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Canadian horror, thriller Still/Born is the tragic tale of Mary (Christine Burke) who gives births to twins, but only one survives - Adam. The joys of being a new parent are subsumed by the understandable trauma and grief. The father, Jack (Jesse Moss) is less emotionally damaged by the experience. He’s a rising star with his employer and having stretched themselves to their financial limits to pay for their home, they need every penny he can earn. Consequently, the pressures of coping with the loss and looking after Adam pile up on the increasingly isolated Mary. As exhaustion and sleep deprivation begin to envelop her, she convinces herself a devil of some sort plans to take Adam. The rational explanation offered to Mary is she’s enduring a form of PTSD. An obvious parallel is Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014), but the horror as a metaphor for a mother’s mental torture from her child isn’t the same with Still/Born. She really is thwarting a vengeful demon child snatcher and by the end Mary is prepared do anything to save her baby.

Brandon Christensen’s feature film debut has a frosty elegance that explodes into a wild and nail-shredding finale. He takes his time to build the dread. A fairly innocent scene of bathing Adam escalates to waking nightmare when Mary is locked out of the bathroom. Screaming Adam lies in a bath filling with water and Christensen’s choice of shots make you as much a helpless witness to the horrifying situation as the character of Mary.

Burke’s portrayal of the descent into madness is wonderfully sad. Her relationship with her supportive neighbour – and new mother - Rachel (Rebecca Olson) doesn’t appear to be as important to the story as the two parents falling apart, but the building up and tearing down of their bond over babies becomes central to the theme and Mary’s demise.

Still/Born is a vivid, scary experience that slowly builds like Rosemary's Baby meets Paranormal Activity with the thriller intensity of The Hand That Rocks The Cradle to carry you over the line.

Ryan Prows organ harvest, crime caper deliriously explores a seedy microcosm of Los Angeles. The action orbits around a motel manager, a corrupt Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officer (ICE), an ex-con with a swastika tattoo over his face, a coke fiend and a masked luchador-cum-hitman. It was born out of an anthology of short films Prows and his film buddies were compiling. But like Roger Avery and Quentin Tarantino did with Pulp Fiction before them, they decided to smash the composite parts together and make a feature instead.

As the title implies, Lowlife is a sordid tale about the kind of people most of us rarely come in contact with, let alone comprehend how they survive day to day. Top of the shop is Mark Burnham as the gregarious, yet imposing Teddy ‘Bear’ Haynes. In his knock off Versace silk shirts and nose perpetually dusted with Columbian marching powder this bad guy is the goggle-eyed life and soul of every scene he’s in. The way he opens up a body to remove the organs or shoots someone is just so normal to him he doesn’t think twice. Arguably his finest scene is an OTT slo-mo shoot out at the motel set to an opera tune. To those who may know of the gangly pop svengali Kim Fowley, imagine his criminal cousin.

More subtle, but no less absurd is El Monstruo - the mythical luchador played by Ricardo Adam Zarate. His introduction, talking to the spoilt brat, Gabriela, surrounded by pink party balloons is both jarring and menacing until her father arrives and you realise it’s him that’s in trouble. Prows use of blackouts at the point when El Monstruo is about to impart his ultraviolence. He goes into a confrontation, faints, and when he awakens his victim’s face has been caved in. It’s a surprisingly effective way of demonstrating his fighting prowess without having to orchestrate the entire sequence.

Lowlife is a bonkers movie that tonally won’t sit still. It deploys pitch-black humour for its laughs, but beneath the graphic violence – of which there is much – and the oblique nihilism there is, surprisingly, a warm, human heart to be found – and I don’t mean the harvested kind - before the final credits roll.

It wouldn’t be Frightfest without a Christmas-themed horror to befuddle your sense of what day it is over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Better Watch Out is that film this year.

Babysitter Ashley (Olivia DeJonge) is the motherhood and apple pie 17-year old blonde woman twelve year olds’ Luke (Levi Miller) and Garrett (Ed Oxenbould) swoon over. The former has read a blog that tells him fear can get a woman wet and into a man’s arms. His naïve plan is simple. While she babysits him he’ll slip on a horror film, they can watch it together and she’ll be so scared, she will be his for the taking. Garrett laughs off this ridiculous idea, but Luke is a determined young man. His lovestruck plans go awry when him and Ashley are subjected to a real home invasion and it is Ashley that must try to protect him. So far, so predictable. Thankfully, the initial cat and mouse, meets horror romcom is all misdirect. Better Watch Out is a much more wicked film than the opening 15 minutes would have you believe. It’d be unfair to spoil the main twist in this review, but suffice to say it evolves into something resembling an R-rated Home Alone survivalist thriller. This includes a direct homage to said family holiday favourite with a paint tin of bright yellow paint on rope tossed over a banister. Astonished Garrett even says to Luke: “You’re going to Home Alone him?”

The clues to BWO’s dark heart and mean spirit are obviously there in hindsight. The interplay between Luke’s parents is both biting satire on the forced jollity of the season combined with the venom of a loveless couple. Virgina Madsen as Luke’s mother berates dad (Patrick Warburton) over his choice of santa tie and love for his ornamental tree decorations. She asks if he’s not really gay. Something he vehemently denies and says he just likes gay things. But the interrogation doesn’t stop there. She asks if he didn’t suck cock at least once at college, by accident. It’s a sequence straight out of the John Water’s school of family dynamics.

Miller and Oxenbould are a great double act as the nightmare representation of internet-weaned millennials who fear nothing and no one’s authority. DeJonge’s fight until the bitter end is an untypical last girl standing journey. Better Watch Out smartly subverts most genre expectations, without ever losing sight of the influences that inspired it in the first place.

BETTER WATCH OUT is released in Cinemas 8th December 2017 courtesy of Universal Pictures.

THE TERROR OF HALLOWS EVE

Director: Todd Tucker

Writers: Zack Ward based on story by Todd Tucker and Ronald L Halvas

Special FX wiz Todd Tucker (Illusion Industries) not only made a horror film that let him play with all of the tools in his toolbox, with The Terror Of Hallow’s Eve (TTOHE) he also got to throw in an act 1 which is largely autobiographical. He was that kid with a hard working single parent mom. He was that teenager with a crush on the girl serving in the shop where he bought his Fangoria. Finally, he was that teen who couldn’t back down when picked on by the older boys and got a good beating for his principles. He didn’t find a magical pumpkin on his way home like Tim (Caleb Thomas) in the film and he didn’t wish to scare them to death when he summoned ‘The Trickster’. Emboldened by his supernatural friend he lures the bullies and the girl from the shop back to his house where in true monkey’s paw traditions the wish fulfilment comes at a great cost to Tim’s sanity as his home becomes a surreal wonderland and the venue for an out of control killing spree. Only when it’s too late does he try to change the Trickster’s mind, but it doesn’t work like that. Everyone in the wish has to die. Set in the 80s there’s a lot of heart felt charm to Hallow’s Eve. True to the period, Tucker uses mainly practical SFX for the abundance of creatures and marionettes on display. ‘The Trickster’ in particular is a fantastical creation with subtle VFX used to add those finishing touches that obtusely bring the mischievous evil one to life alongside Doug Jones’s seamless performance.

Hallow’s Eve is a fun watch with inventive, gruesome moments as the supposed bad guys get their come uppance. “I only wanted to scare them” pleads Tim. There’s surprising turns in the finale so don’t go expecting a happy, cutesy ending where our hero gets the girl.

This is the long awaited sequel to the end of the century cyberpunk, splatter-action horror Meatball Machine (70 minutes version in 1999 and 90 minute version in 2005). It’s been a mad ol’ weekend of films – Attack Of The Adult Babies springs to mind - but none of them scaled the nutso heights of this psychotic piece of trash. In a search for something resembling answers or an explanation, this reviewer turned to Richard Tunaley - a UK born friend who has lived in Japan for over 20 years.

He said: “For all Meatball Machine Kodoku’s explicit portrayal of some of humanities failings, war for example, rape, and its moralising tone, it is - as Philip K. Dick said - sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane (by the looks of it).

Best that I concluded as a question was: Are the aliens giving the now passive (forced to be, beaten in WWII, controlled by GHQ) "warrior people of Japan” their fantasies? An honourable ending through taking individuals over en-masse and fighting them to the death? Or is it just a midnight eye feast for people off their tits? There are lots of general themes from Japanese pop-culture running through, and I don’t think much sense is to be made of it other than that… You?”